Can You Identify Fake Facebook Pages?

A New York Times article asks readers to spot deceiving Facebook accounts based on posts. In the example below, which is from a fake page?

If you guessed the one on the right, you are correct. The best indicator, according to the article, is the poor word choice and grammar at the top of the post: "live" should be "leave," and "End of the story" is atypical English and should read "End of story." Particularly to identify Russian posts, look for missing or misused articles (a, an, the).

But some posters are getting more clever. In the example at right, we see that text is lifted from another source, so the writing style and grammar sound like native English.

I just re-read 2017 Facebook guidelines about spotting fake news. Interestingly, the advice doesn't include looking carefully at grammar, proofreading, and punctuation.

I see family fooled all the time about fake giveaways on Facebook. You can tell when it states something like a free 7 day Disney Cruise, but the page differs slightly from the actually Disney Cruise page. I generally post that it is not true on their posts. Rarely does Disney offer free cruises to the general public just for being one of the 100 that shared it. I never considered bad grammar before, but now I will. Thanks for sharing!

Yes, I often notice grammar issues that lead me to question the credibility. I try to research further, just allowing the grammar issues to be an alert to me that something may be amiss. I still don't feel fully confident in spotting fake posts, just being honest. I try to verify through multiple resources, rather than believing a single source.

Teaching students to spot grammar errors is a great first step! It's definitely important to help them learn to recognize errors and to think more critically about what those errors convey, especially related to bias and credibility in sources. This is a skill we cover in freshman composition classes. Thanks for sharing!